Chapter Text
Now that school is out, the Methodist church has switched to their usual summertime schedule of a single 10:00am service instead of two services with a Sunday school hour between. Following the service there’s a social hour with a simple soup lunch that on special occasions -- such as a baptismal Sunday -- turn into more elaborate potluck affairs. Which is why Suzanne and Eric are awake before seven, mincing hazelnuts and rolling out pie crust for the mini maple butter tarts that Suzanne has decided to take for the Harlan, De Haan, and Wade babies’ christenings.
Eric’s handling the sour cream pastry crust because he’s always had more patience than his mother when it comes to pie crust. He’s filling the tartlet pans with pastry in preparation for flash-refrigeration when his mother starts the conversation.
“I’m glad you and your father had a good talk on Wednesday,” she says, glancing over from where she’s scraping that latest batch of nuts into the bowl.
Eric considers his options for answering and settles for, “Did you put him up to it?” Which might be a little harsh, but he’s only on his first cup of coffee and he’ll be on his feet for another twelve hours today.
Suzanne sighs, “Honey, you give your father too little credit.”
“He couldn’t find a single opening in the past ten years to tell me he was bi? You couldn’t find a way to tell me? Even when you knew about the bullies at school? Even when we sat in Sunday school listening to endless ‘debate’ and ‘dialogue’ about whether homosexual sex is sick or sinful?”
“Your father and I have always spoken up against --”
Eric makes a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, “Mama, don’t you get that there’s a difference between saying, ‘Oh, gay people are just as Godly as us,’ and saying, ‘I’m married to one of the men whose relative humanity you’re sitting here debating’?”
“Dicky, you know we couldn’t do that. There are at least five members of the school board at church, and anyway people talk. He’d have lost his job before the next Sunday came around.”
“I know -- I know -- I just -- errgh,” Eric yanks open the refrigerator door. “I understand why you didn’t say anything publicly. Lord, Mama. A part of me still wants to tell Jack we’re never ever talking to the press because I’ve seen what they say about gay athletes and it terrifies me. So I understand that. I do. What I don’t understand is why you never told me.”
Suzanne scrapes another batch of nuts into the bowl and starts again with a new handful.
“We should have found a way, Dicky, I’m sorry,” she says, finally, setting down her knife and wiping her hands on the towel she has tossed over her shoulder. “It’s just not something either of us have ever had much practice speaking about and -- it’s not the sort of thing you imagine sharing with your child.”
Eric starts rolling out another ball of dough. “You didn’t seem to have trouble telling stories about how you and Coach used to sneak around behind MeeMaw and PopPop. Or showing me the pictures from your senior prom.”
His mother is quiet for a moment and finally says, “You’re right. I know you’re right. I can see it all now, plain as day Dicky. When I've looked back these past two weeks -- but I was so determined not to repeat my mother’s mistakes that I didn’t see the ones we were making. And I’m sorry, honey, truly sorry.”
“What mistakes? I mean -- what mistakes of MeeMaw’s?” Eric asks, out of curiosity.
Suzanne laughs, ruefully, “You’ve heard MeeMaw at family dinners -- ‘Now Charlene, are you still with that nice young man from Savannah?’ -- ‘Tell me, Georgie, have you asked that girl of yours to the movies?’ -- ‘Now look at little Rosie, won’t she grow up to be a fine catch for some young man?’ ” Suzanne’s voice slides into the rhythm of her mother’s chitchat effortlessly. “From the time I was a little girl, I had my mother and her circle of friends planning my future for me -- the pastor’s daughter growing up to be the pastor’s wife. The most radical thing they considered for me was a college degree so I could teach or do missionary work before settling down to have babies and help my future husband run the church.”
Eric works by rote cutting out the circles of pastry dough and fitting them into the tart pans while his mother talks. He’s not sure how this is a response to his question, but he figures he can at least hold his tongue until she’s told her story in full.
“I picked an out-of-state school and I picked studio art because I’d found a book about Judy Chicago in one of the used bookstores near campus halfway through my first semester and decided I’d reject God the father and find the sacred feminine through art. And then I met your father, who’s taught me more than any of the theorists I read what it means to not put people in tidy little boxes according to gender. I know you might find this hard to believe, honey, but your father is the one who helped me not be anxious when it turned out all you wanted to do as a little boy was follow me around the kitchen and begged me to let you take ballet. I was trying to give you … room to learn who you were without assuming like my mother always had. I realize now that silence -- we should have realized, your father and I, that a child fills his parents’ silences with ideas he hears from other people. But that was never my intention, Dicky. I just didn’t want our expectations weighing you down.”
Eric slides the last tray of tarts into the refrigerator and washes his hands at the sink. He’s still trying to wrap his head around these new versions of his parents. He’s only ever known his mother’s work as the assemblages she now makes -- the refurbished antiques with delicately painted scenes: botanicals, the commissioned portraits of family pets, intricate patterns inspired by quilting designs. The lacquered postcards, anonymous snapshots, advertisements, and other ephemera. He has a sudden vision of Lardo and his mother at the next parents’ weekend chatting about the tired symbology of menstrual art. It’s enough to give him a split-second headache.
When his mother explains herself like this, it all seems so obvious why his parents made the decisions they did. And he feels like kind of a dick for holding onto the way he was hurt by the end result -- all those years feeling sure he was a disappointment to his father. All those years wondering if his parents were the sort of liberals who would support gay people in the abstract, but when push came to shove would rather not have one in the family thank you very much.
He takes a deep breath. “I’m -- I’m thinking about not coming home next summer,” is what comes out of his mouth. And when he says it out loud something loosens in his chest. So he tries it again. “I mean -- I’d visit you and Coach. Or maybe you could come visit me? But I think -- I think I need to be away from here, for awhile.” Maybe forever.
Right now, he cannot picture living anywhere in Georgia, even Atlanta, as an openly gay man. He knows people do it, but something dies inside him every time he imagines the possibility. Of having to feel the glares and hear the muttering disapproval. Not to mention the simple fact that if he and Jack stay together -- and Eric refuses to imagine a future in which Jack isn’t his -- they would be legal strangers to one another in his home state, while in all of Canada, in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, they could decide to get married like Georgia and her wife. Or Jack’s uncles.
Eric is just starting to picture a future in New England as one half of a couple. He’s been able to gingerly imagine holding hands with Jack in public, kissing him goodbye at the front door of a shared apartment, sitting in the family section at a Falconers’ game. All without worrying about being beat up in a dark alley later that night.
Down here in the South, his future just feels like one long march of endless solitude and silence.
“Oh, Dicky, sweetheart,” Suzanne says, “I want you to be happy. And safe. I’ve always known that maybe -- maybe that won’t be possible down here in Georgia.” She sounds sad, but unsurprised by the thought. “I’m a Southern girl born and bred, but you --” she comes over and places a small hand against his cheek, “--you aren’t bound by the life your parents have chosen, Dicky. Any more than I was bound by the life my parents lived. The only thing -- the only thing I ask -- and your father would agree with me -- the only thing I ask is that you stay in school until you’re through. That boy of yours, I can see the generosity in his eyes, and his parents are good people. It could be a temptation to --”
“I won’t quit, Mama,” Eric is relieved that this is a request he can happily grant. “I’m excited about going back to school next year -- and I couldn’t let the team down like that, anyway! And Jack’s right down the road -- closer than driving up to Atlanta! I was just thinking that maybe next summer -- I like my friends at Camp but it doesn’t pay so good. And there’s probably people I could learn from up in Massachusetts. I thought maybe -- a bakery or a food truck or -- well, anyway, something. I was gonna talk to my adviser about internships, maybe a summer research project.”
His mother nods, firmly, in approval and returns to the mixing bowl where she dips a pinkie finger into the maple-currant-hazelnut mix and then reaches for the cardamom to add a pinch more. “That’s my boy. Your father and I will hold you to it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Eric smiles with relief and throws her a mock salute before reaching to set the oven 350℉. The future is starting to unfurl gently before him, and Eric feels better and better about the possibilities he sees there.